Gartner Suggests UniverseBridge For Solving Traditional BI Roadblocks

If you weren’t already aware, traditional BI platform vendors are under a lot of pressure to change their traditional way of handling customer data to stay relevant in a market where data discovery vendors give new, valuable options to businesses.

In a report from this past year, Gartner analysts Josh Parenteau, Rita L. Sallam, and Cindi Howson explained the major shift happening in the BI and Analytics world. Businesses want to get a variety of their employees to get their hands on relevant company data. The traditional BI vendors such as Oracle built their systems to protect the “single version of the truth” desire for their clients. Now, with the rise of the data discovery tools like Qlik, Birst and Tableau, “customers will increasingly demand that traditional vendors modernize and support a more open and accessible architecture,” according to Gartner.

How Does The Data Discovery Shift Impact Traditional BI?

The Gartner article gave three impacts that this shift to data discovery platforms will have on these incumbent, traditional BI vendors and gives three recommendations for business intelligence and analytics leaders in light of the shifts’ impacts.

1. Traditional BI vendors need to invest in data discovery development and modernize their semantic layer to have open accessibility if they want to remain relevant.
2. Independent software vendors and system integrators will develop new middle-tier solutions to allow for data discovery tools to access the traditional BI’s semantic-layer. This is where UniverseBridge comes into play.
3. New vendors will continue to offer modern alternatives to the traditional semantic layer and allow for users to do self-service data preparation, which will continue to limit the traditional vendors growth potential in the market.

What Should I Do?

If you are a BI and analytics leader, Gartner, Inc. recommends that you do the following:

1. Compare the progress and market traction between traditional BI vendors relative to data discovery vendors.
2. Make buying decisions based on functionality and end-user requirements for self-service in order to maximize business uptake of analytics solutions.
3. “Explore and evaluate third-party solutions that offer a vendor-agnostic abstraction layer between your data discovery tools and your existing semantic-layer architecture to drive shared communication and understanding of information outputs.”

UniverseBridge Can Help

According to Gartner, Inc., a solution to #3, accessing traditional BI semantic layers to translate data into your data discovery tool, is Analytics8’s UniverseBridge “approach to allow data discovery tools to access Web Intelligence content… The content can be based on traditional SQL queries as well as SAP BEx queries.”

UniverseBridge provides connectivity for Tableau, Birst, Tibco Spotfire, QlikView and Qlik Sense to consume SAP BusinessObjects data.

For more information, read the full Gartner report or learn about UniverseBridge.